Situational Awareness - Learning to See

Project teams need to be able to quickly make the thousands of decisions required to keep the project on-track.

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
D. Brown Management
March 27, 2018 2 minute read
Share

It is critical for project teams to develop a complete 5D model of the project in their minds.

Situational Awareness: Learning to See, Perception, Comprehension, and Projection. Book: Learning to See by John Shook and Mike Rother

This is called Situational Awareness and includes three basic layers:

  1. PERCEPTION of data and the elements of the environment.  
  2. COMPREHENSION of the meaning and significance of the situation.
  3. PROJECTION of future states and events.  

If you are training yourself or someone else start at 1st layer and focus on seeing more elements of the environment.  Ask questions that stretch yourself and others to see things. Use checklists to help train. Create drills to improve both the quantity and quality of elements seen as well as speed. 

The lean body of knowledge starts with “seeing waste” in the value stream.  A great book on this topic is called “Learning to See” and Paul Akers has a great talk on this called “Lean is Simple” 

Incentive Compensation for Contractors - Who Benefits?
How would you rank the beneficiaries of a great incentive program, including Field Craft Workers, Service Technicians, the Project Management team, Executives / Owners, your customers, vendors, or others?
Related Article
Cash Flow Myth 2 - Finance Manages Cash Flow
Finance people manage cash flow. The reality is that by the time the finance team gets involved in a cash flow problem there are very few levers they can pull.
Related Article
Impacted Productivity - Disrupted Workflow (No Schedule "Flow")
One of the biggest impacts to productivity in construction is when tasks cannot be completed as planned. When this happens frequently, it starts to impact every aspect of the contractor’s scoreboard in a negative way starting with customer satisfaction.
Related Article